Cromwell now thought no more of his retreat.  He marched back to the capital; the hope of resistance was abandoned; Edinburgh and Leith opened their gates, and the whole country to the Forth submitted

[Footnote 1:  Carte’s Letters, i. 381.  Whitelock, 470, 471.  Ludlow, i. 283.  Balfour, iv. 97.  Several proceedings, No. 50.  Parl.  Hist. xix. 343-352, 478.  Cromwelliana, 89.  Of the prisoners, five thousand one hundred, something more than one-half, being wounded, were dismissed to their homes, the other half were driven “like turkies” into England.  Of these, one thousand six hundred died of a pestilential disease, and five hundred were actually sick on Oct 31.—­Whitelock, 471.  Old Parl.  Hist. xix. 417.]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1650.  Sept. 3.]

to the will of the English general.  Still the presumption of the six ministers who formed the committee of the kirk was not humbled.  Though their predictions had been falsified, they were still the depositaries of the secrets of the Deity; and, in a “Short Declaration and Warning,” they announced[a] to their countrymen the thirteen causes of this national calamity, the reasons why “God had veiled for a time his face from the sons of Jacob.”  It was by the general profaneness of the land, by the manifest provocations of the king and the king’s house, by the crooked and precipitant ways of statesmen in the treaty of Breda, by the toleration of malignants in the king’s household, by suffering his guard to join in the battle without a previous purgation, by the diffidence of some officers who refused to profit by advantages furnished to them by God, by the presumption of others who promised victory to themselves without eyeing of God, by the rapacity and oppression exercised by the soldiery, and by the carnal self-seeking of men in power, that God had been provoked to visit his people with so direful and yet so merited a chastisement.[1]

To the young king the defeat at Dunbar was a subject of real and ill-dissembled joy.  Hitherto he had been a mere puppet in the hands of Argyle and his party; now their power was broken, and it was not impossible for him to gain the ascendancy.  He entered into a negotiation with Murray, Huntley, Athol, and the numerous royalists in the Highlands; but the secret, without the particulars, was betrayed to Argyle,[b] probably by Buckingham, who disapproved of the project; and all the cavaliers but three received an order to leave the court in twenty-four hours—­the

[Footnote 1:  Balfour, iv. 98-107.]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1650.  Sept. 12.] [Sidenote b:  A.D. 1650.  Sept. 27.]

kingdom in twenty days.  The vigilance of the guards prevented the execution of the plan which had been laid; but one afternoon, under pretence of hawking, Charles escaped[a] from Perth, and riding forty-two miles, passed the night in a miserable hovel, called Clova, la the braes of Angus.  At break of day he was overtaken by Colonel Montgomery, who advised him[b] to return, while the Viscount Dudhope urged him to proceed to the mountains, where he would be joined by seven thousand armed men.  Charles wavered; but Montgomery directed his attention to two regiments of horse that waited at a distance to intercept his progress, and the royal fugitive consented[c] to return to his former residence in Perth.[1]